Emerald – Facebook Marketing – Vietnam

Here is a post from Elisa Haidt, Senior Marketing Manager at Adobe Systems and a member of the world-wide education marketing team.

Challenge: For this project, the challenge was clear: Increase awareness among college students for the launch of Adobe Student Editions in North America; we wanted students to know that they can purchase Adobe products at a steep discount for students (up to 80% off the full retail price).

Action: Facebook is a natural fit to help Adobe reach college students. But, we also know that students are bombarded with media each day. We needed to engage with students in a way that would be fun, show them what they could do with our products, as well as let them know about the discount.

To do this, we launched “Real or Fake”, a game embedded on our Facebook page that challenged users to determine whether a photo was real or “fake” (edited with Photoshop). The game was produced by Traction. It is no longer live on the Adobe Page on Facebook but for a live demo please click here.

The game lasted for 4 weeks, with 5 photos being posted each week. If a photo had been edited with Photoshop, a tutorial showed how that was done. And, at the end of the game, users were presented with information about Adobe Student Editions and there were 3 primary call-to-actions: 1) “Buy Now”, 2) “Play Again” and 3) “Share” the game with others.

Results: This game launched in November 2008 and ran for one month. Social ads on Facebook ran during the first two weeks. About 10% of our page visitors played the game and, of those who played, 6% clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6% clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game. Due to this game and media placement, our page received over 6,000 new fans too.

Lessons Learned:

Engage, engage, engage (and deliver): By engaging with students with Real or Fake, we were able to draw attention to the launch of Adobe Student Editions, let students know about low pricing for them and we also showed them what they can do with our products.

Content and sharing: The game was appealing because of its fun content, and easy-to-play game. We knew students were engaged when a discussion board started with people posting what photos they were guessing correctly or incorrectly.

Integrate with media: Facebook’s targeted, engaging, and social ads let us get the word out; the success of this game was tied to having an integrated media strategy at the same time as launching the game.